The designer missed the clear oppurtunity of making each dome spin around its own axis as well.

If you look at 4:30 it actually kind of look like the domes are attached to the ring via giant hinges, and are supposed to swing outwards while the ship is under thrust to be in line with the rest of the gravity. That hinge mechanism would also explain why they are only attached on one side. My guess is that this ship is a typical case where the the designers put in a lot of thought to make sure everything makes sense and gravity is consistent throughout the ship, and then the show runners just either forgot about it, or deliberately ignored it because because they thought the ship looks cooler with the domes folded in and spinning.

The reset button being in the reactor housing is like the most 40K grim dark turned grim derp thing ever.

Funny thing, the first ship that came to my mind, when you criticize Nightflyer at first, with actual functional design was Argo from "Battletech" and moment later you brought it yourself!

My problem with the design was that having flat habitats on a centrifuge will lead to a sloping gravity effect inside each dome, where it actually feels like being on a hill.

7:50 "How big is your engineering crew and how good is their life insurance?" If servicing the engines is fatal to the crew, the only crew you will get will be those with weird psychological disorders. That could make for an interesting plot.

when I first saw this ship, I assumed the ring of domes were at the stern ... some sort of containment/propulsion system

So, what I thought was the stern was actually the bow? That really isn't a promising start!

I love how this sci-fi ship that basically represents the whole of humanity, has reactor design, safety and management at the same level as Chernobyl.

They're clearly hinged, so my guess is that the animators didn't get the memo from the concept artist/ship designer, the writers didn't want to work gravity changes into the script, or some executive didn't like how it looked and vetoed it. Given the described plot contrivances, my money is on the writers fucking things up.

Epic fails are many. They are afraid of dark matter but have no problem cruising through the corona of a star at full speed. They can slow down enough to land on a planet and speed up again, but needed a star for a gravity assisted speed boost.

IF , big if , the Domes could gimbal outwards , like a Daisy Wheel , and the Rotation reduce , the system could work . Reset Button INSIDE the Engine . Obviously designed by a Shiny Arse , rather than an Engineer . L O L !

when I first saw this ship I honestly thought it looked amazing, then I went what do you mean those aren't mining drills on the front.

If the ship was shrunk down and the domes replaced with cutting heads I might see the design as an asteroid mining ship but even then it wouldn't be a very good one.

I’ve never seen the show but I’ve read to story by George R Martin and I thought you enjoy a few details from the story that may not been covered in the show. The ship was custom designed by that crazy lady who infected the ai of the ship. Maybe this explains some of the nonsense features. The person leading the expedition to meet the new race was considered kinda a cook if I remember correctly and did not have a lot of funding which was why this weirdo ship was chosen! Thanks for the amazing content! Keep up the great work

"lets just keep skipping through the crazy" im totally stealing that. :D

I kinda remember this series. Yeah, it sucked. What really killed it for me was when that probe came back full of flesh and started bleeding all over the place. After that I had to be falling-over drunk to finish it and see where it crashed.

Kind of remind me of the "space garden" ships in "silent running".

"What if we hit a micro asteroid, Captain?" "Don't worry, we've got glass in the sideways gardens, I hear that's pretty tough."

The domes are. . . cute. I get the general idea it has been suggested before. Nice clear domes so sunlight comes in for the plants. This would be great if this was a space station in a specific orbit somewhere. Normally I see a video trashing a scifi ship I want to argue. But this sounds like a train wreck. No a train wreck would probably be a more sound design.

I'm just thinking of the structural stress of having combined forces on the supporting arms of those domes. I see them snapping off in a catastrophic way.

This is even worse than you think, that spinning section wouldn't just spin by itself. It would impart an opposite motion to the rest of the ship, so you'd have the whole thing counter rotating. Eeeeeven better still, bodies with spinny bits with uneven distributions of mass, in zero-g 'flip'. (video from the ISS showing this funky effect: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Z9Rde7CEqKq9pIE.html) Suffice to say, the ships design wouldn't make it out of earth orbit. (well perhaps as a debris cloud maybe)

What it reminds me of is the *_Valley Forge_* from *_Silent Running,_* one of the few SF spacecraft which is more *_BADLY_* designed than the *_Nightflyer._*

Never seen the series. But looking at the pictures of the ship, wow. Love your review and i would agree. Compress that ship into a cube and recycle?

Good centrifuge designs in Dream Pod 9's "Jovian Chronicles" where they are gimballed to reorient while under thrust [and rotation is stopped for that]

Who designed it? Clearly a descendent of the guy who designed TITANIC.

"Things you can see through are not as strong as things you cannot" Diamond has entered the chat.

So essentially it is part Valley Forge, Red dwarf, discovery one, made out of unbeleivabulium...

This is yet another fun example of "Design by Committee", and whats worse judging by the cameras, AI issues, and so on that Committee consisted entirely of Hollywood Executives and one Art Student Intern. O.o

1. Mummy please make the bad ship go away. 2. The captain in the tube reminds me of the 'Ship that Sang' books not a bad read. 3. Holy mummy issues Batman what's this Evangelion

Earth Force destroyers remind me greatly of the Leonov from 2010: The Year We Made Contact

Knowing Nothing about this Show. Just looking at the ship, visually it reminds me of Valley Forge from "Silent Running". With the domes inverted. I wonder if the design is an homage. Hmmh, that one might be worth tearing into at some point. I assume Valley Forge had some kind of space magic gravity generation...

I want to know why their NUCLEAR REACTOR has a COMBUSTION CHAMBER?! That's like the British reactor in the 50s or 60s that had a legit chimney!

"It looks cool" For a TV show, that's all is needed, it doesn't have to make sense. The only exceptions I can think of, are the ships from "2001, 2010, and the Expanse". In novels, the reference should be the Rama series from master Clarke. By the way, suscribed. I love to be witness of a good rant, and some time has passed from the "Star Disney" movies... Oh, the rages! The hate! The betrayed feelings!...Good times.

And there's no way that amount of plants is going to provide more than a drop in the bucket of that ship's oxygen needs

No surprise that George RR Martin was the writer who specializes in medieval stories. Also the "Designer' is the the evil woman trapped in the ships computers.

Nightflyer "Look at the domes I have." STARLOST "Hold my beer..." (1973 CTV)

Regarding the front of ship, absorbing kinetic energy is highly likely to be majorly developed by the time we are exploring space with ships like that. Still though I agree, we'd still want a craft to be as robust as possible under all seen and unforseen conditions. It's almost a certainly we'd be aware of other species in space by then too... Some would argue we already know. The odds are not all other species will react friendly.

Domes to let in the light of deep space...well, maybe they can grow food and make air when they're near Earth orbit and pointed at the sun?

too be fair the domes in some shoes look like there supposed to be able to fold out from the spinning ring at the attaching point so they could stop spinning it to switch to thrust G but they would be incon vient as hell

Oh, Battletech. I love you, but 'zenith and nadir points' aren't trojan points, and going from a solar polar orbit to the plane of the ecliptic takes a lot of ∆v. Like...A LOT.

A ghost running around in the AI? So you are telling me that the ship has a... Ghost in the Machine... ah ah ah heh.

The only way they could get away with this is if the domes only rotated when the ship wasn't under acceleration, like in orbit or in a just floating along at a constant speed, oh wait you mentioned that

Reminds me of the ships in the 1970s Sci-Fi Masterpiece - Silent Running :)

"Ok...that's a weird nesting doll of horror..." LOL!

I believe in the novel the ship was built by the captain's mother. She created a sex switched clone of herself to be her partner/son. That is the current captain.

This show sounds like someone read Revelation Space but skipped around a lot.

When space sci-fi so blatantly ignores physics, it turns me off immediately. I can forgive a little "I guess so" in the depiction, and even miracles lite artificial gravity over this turkey.

Mirrored my thoughts. I lost patience with Nightflyers very quickly. It was too silly.

I was completely unaware of this series, but god, that is an awful ship design by any stretch. Even if for some reason I *wanted* to do that mess on the front end in a somewhat plausible way, I would have had a Secondary ring in front of it that the domes were locked into on the other side, and then some sort of an impact shell in front of that, protecting the entire ship from things in front of them. The domes would be designed to spin around that center while the ship was free floating, but would rotate on their own axis to face forward when in burn. It would be like a really massive Ferris wheel. I guess there is some point to that, if you really wanted to maintain gravity regardless of speed, but chances are you would still lose proper gravity fairly regularly due to necessary changes in speed and course.

It's sad that there went a lot of thought into the design to make it look realistic but it all falls flat because filmmakers are apparently allergic to understanding physics.

It's perfectly alright, the crew likely just treat the domes like one of those spinning carnival rides where you're pinned to a wall. In all fairness, proper biohazard procedures are something they should win some big points for because literally no other setting ever gets that right.

This ship is a "No OSHA compliance" nightmare

Yeah, the design is dubious. There should be a rotational hub in the middle of the ship. The center stack should be microgravity (unless you're under thrust).

Looking at some of the shots, it looks like the domes are meant to flip out when under thrust, didn't happen, but maybe someone at least tried?

11:40 Beautiful conclusive statement at the end. 😂👍

Ships named Nightflyer make me nervous. And so it's confirmed that this is based the novel and film of the same name.

Some times, the "rule of cool", just makes you want to shoot the designers.

Oddly enough, this version of the Nightflyer is its second incarnation. There was a movie version of the story long before the series was made. The ship design was completely different although no better in terms of aesthetics. It looked like a partly melted flatiron with the handle removed. The movie was much better than the series however.

All I remember from this show, despite that I watched it, is that the ship has showers in the form of those weird glass coffins that can _easily_ drown you, which is exactly what happens or almost happens to one of the characters. That alone speaks volumes about the considerations for safety or basic common sense in its construction.

Mech-Warriors: Yay, Argo! Maintenance Crew: Who the actual eff designed these stupid ass, hinged living area pods!

Basically this ship would have been much better suited as a space station than anything meant to travel anywhere but low orbit.

Actually the thrust to rotational "gravity" options also appears in the book The Mote in God's Eye (1982 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) where the rotational system is used when the ship is on station somewhere while the thrust system is used when the ship is going somewhere. And yes they do explain how people have to switch the "wall" to the "floor" and how furniture has to move to make this work.

The dare was a good call, you are good content sir

It would have made sense for the greenhouse pods to be arranged like that if they folded out (or pivoted in as to not leave a huge central gap) during acceleration so that "down remained the floor" and also if they were multi decked with the lower decks being crew space as it would then further justified putting extra "transparent armor" on them and making them feasible as a starship bow. My guess is that the technical advisor/designer for the show had a similar idea and that maybe there was even an episode where that was a central plot point but it got cut out so it wasn't a developed plot feature in order to strictly follow the law of Chekhov's gun.

I'm glad I missed that show.

So there's a Ghost in the Ai A Ghost in the Machine as you said. Now... where have I heard that before!.

SyFy lost me when they canceled Dark Matter.

The ship looks like a hand held blender. I never seen this show. Missed it somehow.

It looks like the domes were designed in concept to be able to fold forward. That'd actually make the most sense, by being able to angle them between 0 and 90 degrees you'd be able to have 1g inside at all times, regardless of ship acceleration. All you'd need to do is slow down the rotation of the ring and fold the domes forward during ship burns. That being said, if the series never showed this, or worse it specifically shows the domes folded while under acceleration, then that's on the director. I wouldn't really call that the fault of the ship design though. Anyway, all the other points are spot on. The domes look like they would tear off without handwavingly strong materials.

Whoever desinged this things should have his/her engineering diploma revoked.

You could have a nice landscape in the domes of terraced cliff-side city, like Morocco, Hong Kong, or Pueblo Bonita. Spectacular views. It would be interesting if the doctors eventually dictate that you have to achieve 1G average gravity, but also had portions of your ship that would require manning in microgravity, so people rotate in and out. I maintain that the primary thing you have to account for with 1G thrusting vehicles is whether the universe incorporates their status as projectiles of mass destruction, as planet-killers. "If everybody has this tech, and can achieve relativistic impacts with ease, how are there any inhabited planets left?"

Speaking of Thrust gravity, maybe some battletech stuff? The Egg carriers, the special ship from the HBS videogame (I imagine you'll be annoyed at the gravity blocks being complicated on hinges, those things failing actually can be a random event you get), or the Leopard and how so many video games give you a Leopard and forget it TOO has only thrust-gravity? Oh holy shit you actually do cover the HBS Argo!

There is more stuff in interstellar space than you'd imagine. Actually, whole starcluster masses of material flies between the stars. It's not a lot of stuff flying freely around like in a planetary sytem, but it's enough that, if you travel with a significant percentage of the speed of light, it would accumulate. Even just one hydrogen atom per squaremeter would add up to tons of hydrogen colliding at relativisitc speeds with the hull of your ship after just a few hours of travel. The friction would turn it into a plasma and it would spew out terawatts of radiowaves in the direction of travel. So, yeah... very bad news for the domes in front of the ship. They're pretty much done... they get grinded down.

It looks like an over-decorated knockoff of a B5 Explorer class.

With that outtro statement, have you ever played Star Citizen. Might be fun to hear your thoughts on some of those ships. Morphologus does reviews on Star Citizen ships, but he's comming at them from an architectural background. Might be fun to have the opinions from a navy background.

I assume the domes were made of glass to allow sunlight in, but this effect is nullified by the fact that _the domes are all pointing inward._

Cigar or elongated seafaring-shaped space ships (no liquid water to traverse in space) with doodads hanging off them are always a bad idea. Furthermore, space is packed by the cubic millimeter with thousands of dust particles that are cruising at an average speed of 25 miles per second, so ships like the one featured in this video, traveling at least 60 miles per second to generate 1G, would either suffer constant serious damage or be completely trashed after just a few days. Google an image of the nose section and window plates of the space shuttle after just a few days in space to see what I mean.

Reminds of a poorly designed OPA Behemoth. it had a spinny drum but it was the bulk and centered mass and wasn't designed to necessarily be on while under thrust.

My ears are burning. As should this ship.

Only one life pod? With one seat? Sounds like a 19th century White Star cruise.

Yeah, the ship at a glance doesn't look too stupid, but when you started to mention how its accelerating at 1 G to simulate gravity on the rest of the ship, its like, why did you even build the spinny domes in the first place when you could have just not have them spin and turn them up?!

I don't watch this show, and when I looked at the thumbnail I figured that the primary drive would HAVE to be the thing with the domes and middle spike, and those bell-ends were at the BOW of the boat just to piss away some velocity in midcourse or at the destination. Boy was I wrong.

This ship looked cool... Then I found out which end was the front.

I don't know if anyone pointed this out yet, but the glass on the domes is literally useless! Someone might say: But the Plants need light! Then I reply: Yeah Stupid, but they will not get it from our Sun while we travel through deepspace to a new liveform! The light intensity from a sphere like our sun decreeces by the power of 3 the further away you are, so you would nee additional lights to feed the plants enough UV Light for photosynthesis. Also why would you want it to be glass anyway!? The unfiltered cosmic radiation cannot be good for the plants as well as the gardeners.

Also... how long are their trips? I mean, newtonian physics fuckery aside, you run 1G for a year and you're gonna be hitting C

The Valley Foge in Silent Running was a lot better an the Domes looked more functional in the opposite facing .

the only... ONLY way those domes would make sense is if they rotated... if they opened outwards, then when under 1g of thrust the domes where in the line of gravity, then when the engines shut off, the domes rotated back into position, and THEN began rotating for gravity... THAT would make sense.. But no... never ask them to make sense

Seems like the Domes would fold out while the ship is thrusting.

I have not watched this television show personally. That said, based on what I heard in this video, I see these problems with this spacecraft: (1) Having the rotating section of the spaceship -- the domes -- at the FRONT will cause problems when the vessel tries to maneuver in any way due to gyroscopic forces such as precession. The Omega Class destroyers from *BABYLON 5* had their rotating sections amidships to minimize these problems. (2) I do not know the exact numbers, but a spacecraft accelerating at a constant one gravity would be close to the speed of light within two to three years. That brings the problems of having any debris that hits the spacecraft moving passed it at near the speed of light, AND inducing the time dilation effect, in addition to having to turn the spacecraft around -- fighting the aforementioned gyroscopic effects -- just slow down halfway through the trip.

its alright it got cancelled years ago so its fine, leave it in the dust and let it be forgotten. don't put attention to it or they'll make a season 2

By 8:30 I'm strongly suspecting that it isn't a ship, it's a overcomplicate offering dish to some supernatural entity

Great sign-out!

6:19 I think some of the mech repair bays are in the gravity blocks. For work better done while under gravity.

Wait, that's the bow, not some sort of fusion drive magnetic containment system? Oh.

How is it supposed to fly into the sun at night? Everyone knows there's no sun at night!

“steaming pile of suck and fail” LOl - subscribed. Keep up the great work!

What's the point of a transparent dome over a hydroponics section when it's artificial lit and you are out of range of star light for the plants?

honestly the design look like drill head.

The domes look like something from Silent Running, the Movie.